LONG BEACH, CA—Is texting shorthand a convenience, a catastrophe for the English language, or actually something new and special? John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, sides with the latter. According to McWhorter, texting is actually a new form of speech, and he outlined the reasons why today at the TED2013 conference in Southern California.

We often hear that “texting is a scourge,” damaging the literacy of the young. But it’s “actually a miraculous thing,” McWhorter said. Texting, he argued, is not really writing at all—not in the way we have historically thought about writing. To explain this, he drew an important distinction between speech and writing as functions of language. Language was born in speech some 80,000 years ago (at least). Writing, on the other hand, is relatively new (5,000 or 6,000 years old). So humanity has been talking for longer than it has been writing, and this is especially true when you consider that writing skills have hardly been ubiquitous in human societies.

Furthermore, writing is typically not a reflection of casual speech. “We speak in word packets of seven to 10 words. It’s much more loose, much more telegraphic,” McWhorter said. Of course, speech can imitate writing, particularly in formal contexts like speechmaking. He pointed out that in those cases you might speak like you write, but it's clearly not a natural way of speaking.

Javier Benek

But what about writing like you speak? Historically this has been difficult. Speed is a key issue. “[Texting is] fingered-speech. Now we can write the way we talk,” McWhorter said. Yet we view this as some kind of decline. We don’t capitalize words, obey grammar or spelling rules, and the like. Yet there is an “emerging complexity…with new structure” at play. To McWhorter, this structure facilitates the speed and packeted nature of real speech.

Take "LOL," for instance. It used to mean “laughing out loud,” but its meaning has changed. People aren’t guffawing every time they write it. Now “it’s a marker of empathy, a pragmatic particle,” he said. “It’s a way of using the language between actual people.”

This is just one example of a new battery of conventions McWhorter sees in texting. They are conventions that enable writing like we speak. Consider the rules of grammar. When you talk, you don’t think about capitalizing names or putting commas and question marks where they belong. You produce sounds, not written language. Texting leaves out many of these conventions, particularly among the young, who make extensive use of electronic communication tools.

McWhorter thinks what we are experiencing is a whole new way of writing that young people are using alongside their normal writing skills. It is a “balancing act… an expansion of their linguistic repertoire,” he argued.

The result is a whole new language, one that wouldn't be intelligible to people in the year 1993 or 1973. And where it's headed, it will likely be unintelligible to us were we to jump ahead 20 years in time. Nevertheless, McWhorter wants us to appreciate it now: “It’s a linguistic miracle happening right under our noses,” he said.

Forget the "death of writing" talk. Txt-speak is a new, rapidly evolving form of speech.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher

130 Reader Comments

Am I the only one that never deals with "txt-speak"? I don't text a whole lot, but in the age of auto-correcting, auto-capitalizing smartphone keyboards it would require effort on my part to produce this kind of writing. Even size of the messages isn't much of a limitation with either unlimited texting plans or data-based messaging like WhatsApp. The texts that I get are mostly correct functioning sentences.

It might be for some, but for others it's just an excuse for a shocking lack of literacy. I've actually hidden updates from someone on Facebook because his fiancé is constantly commenting using 'txt-spk'.

Gd - goodwel - wellwiv - withwoz - was

I'm sorry, but ... no. Especially the last one. You don't even save any letters!! It's purposefully mangling the spelling of a word!!

Am I the only one that never deals with "txt-speak"? I don't text a whole lot, but in the age of auto-correcting, auto-capitalizing smartphone keyboards it would require effort on my part to produce this kind of writing. Even size of the messages isn't much of a limitation with either unlimited texting plans or data-based messaging like WhatsApp. The texts that I get are mostly correct functioning sentences.

Most people I know now have a smartphone and so I generally get texts that make sense. I've always insisted on sending fully formed sentences (even in the old days where I'd literally have to send several texts at a time).

Am I the only one that never deals with "txt-speak"? I don't text a whole lot, but in the age of auto-correcting, auto-capitalizing smartphone keyboards it would require effort on my part to produce this kind of writing. Even size of the messages isn't much of a limitation with either unlimited texting plans or data-based messaging like WhatsApp. The texts that I get are mostly correct functioning sentences.

I think it's a function of your age. LOL is the only txt-speak I will use and I'm 30. My brother in law is low 20s and seems to abbreviate everything even when not texting. Today I learned (TIL, LOL) that "hmu" is "hit me up".

Consider the rules of grammar. When you talk, you don’t think about capitalizing names or putting commas and question marks where they belong. You produce sounds, not written language.

Sure, but some of that grammar in writing, commas and periods, are there specifically to mimic some aspects of speech. Txt-speak actually leaves that out making everything one very long and hard to follow run on sentence that has no structure and isn't how anybody I'd want to talk would actually speak because it would be really frustrating if they spoke without ever pausing for a breath.

I for one am all for the txtifcation of speech. I think a lot of the rules of writing are archaic and unneeded in today's society, yet we rigidly enforce them because they are the 'rules'.

Seriously, what is the value of spelling out 'you' over just 'u'? So long as the reader understands what is being communicated, who cares how its spelled? Same thing with there vs they're. I roll my eyes anytime some pedant corrects one for the other. Its like really? You cant tell the difference from context?

The point of language is to communicate, it seems to me we should embrace norms that make that easier.

It might be for some, but for others it's just an excuse for a shocking lack of literacy. I've actually hidden updates from someone on Facebook because his fiancé is constantly commenting using 'txt-spk'.

Gd - goodwel - wellwiv - withwoz - was

I'm sorry, but ... no. Especially the last one. You don't even save any letters!! It's purposefully mangling the spelling of a word!!

You could move to France or The Netherlands were they have committees whose job is to stop the evolution of the language. Personally, I'm just fine with the idea that languages evolve over time for various reasons.

I mean, if you live in the U.S., do you spell it "color" or "colour"? Because "color" was literally just a creation of some guy that decided you didn't need an extra 'u'... and it caught on.

The community backlash is unsurprising, but I believe McWhorter has an interesting thought. If you can ignore or look past the eyeball-offending spellings, his point is that text/IM/chat patterns mimic the way we use the spoken word more closely than traditional writing.

That is noteworthy, anecdotes about your nephew's FB posts notwithstanding.

I've been a fan of McWhorter ever since I read his book, "Doing Our Own Thing: The Decline of the English Language, and Why We Should, Like, Care." I would agree that texting is a lot closer to speech than actual writing; however, I feel that a major mark of a good education is speech patterns getting closer to what would classically be considered written speech. 'Written' speech not being common doesn't mean it's not desireable.

I don't mind if people use it, but to me it still feels like they are somewhat illiterate. You usually can't tell if they are using a new spelling or just don't know how to spell, so I guess it is a good cover up excuse.

Personally I believe that a large part of txt-spk is the result of the lack of a standard key set that you would find on a keyboard for the most part. All those dumb phones helped spur this 'advance' in language.

The exception would be those of us who used to use chatrooms/irc. Sometimes it had to do with speed, sometimes not. I used to be able to write over 100/wpm. now it might be less but its from lack of use.

I don't mind if people use it, but to me it still feels like they are somewhat illiterate. You usually can't tell if they are using a new spelling or just don't know how to spell, so I guess it is a good cover up excuse.

I dunno, I see lol as a new word or at least a particle depicting the expression of humor. I have yet to meet anyone that actually sees it as "Laughing Out Loud.' To me and those I know, it's simply a new way of saying "hahaha"

I don't mind if people use it, but to me it still feels like they are somewhat illiterate. You usually can't tell if they are using a new spelling or just don't know how to spell, so I guess it is a good cover up excuse.

LOL is an acronym. Lol is a word. They don't mean the same thing, which is what McWhorter is saying.

I personally text as I would write through any informal means (such as here), capitalizing words and using complete sentences, etc., although I do have a hardware keyboard that I can touch-type that I can thank for that. Still, I there are some acronyms I'll use even if they only save seven or eight characters (wtf, rofl, hmu, and such.) I think his observations are really accurate in that we're adding new methods of communicating things that normally could only be properly communicated through vocal inflections and the like, and in fact I'd really like to see some formal methods introduced eventually, as written language gets more and more important as the internet gets even more ubiquitous.

Omitting letters and punctuation, and using abbreviations, is nothing new. In fact, this was common in the earliest written languages. Why? Because the medium then, chiseling in stone, was as difficult to use as the medium now, a numeric keyboard. This is not an advance, this is regression.

Consider the rules of grammar. When you talk, you don’t think about capitalizing names or putting commas and question marks where they belong. You produce sounds, not written language.

Sure, but some of that grammar in writing, commas and periods, are there specifically to mimic some aspects of speech. Txt-speak actually leaves that out making everything one very long and hard to follow run on sentence that has no structure and isn't how anybody I'd want to talk would actually speak because it would be really frustrating if they spoke without ever pausing for a breath.

I agree. The disconnect occurs because it may be "speech" to the sender, but the recipient has to read it as writing. For all except the simplest of communications, there still has to be enough structure for the recipient to be able to read the intent and meaning of the message without all the non-verbal clues we get when speaking with someone.

This is all about this mixing of the formal and informal registers. Previously, we only had this mixing in the spoken word. Now, you have formal and informal both coming through written mediums. What's so different about this is just as the informal register always has words in flux which will date speakers of a certain period "You're so rad" "That was a gasser!" "Really?" (as in "Is that actually how you are going to treat the situation?" ) these are short lived markers which are preserved in text (which one could argue my examples disprove, but imagine that people weren't just saying "Rad" in the 80's; there was a rich vocabulary of 80s words, which basically don't exist anymore.

Also, I think it's important to understand where McWhorter is coming from in terms of "Language". He's not talking about what is in a grammar book. He's talking about what is in people's minds and what is coming out of their mouths for communication. He was famously one of the major proponents of promoting the status of Ebonics as a language (as in the book "Word on the Street"). It's not what we were talking about in elementary school.

Use your spell check in Word. ferget abaut it on tha fone, were doin it fer the lawlz

I think txt-spk is fine, when it's in an SMS message or a tweet, when there is a constraint on the total number of characters permitted per message. It isn't fine in, for example, emails or forum posts where the maximum permitted length of the message is much greater (or indeed, unlimited). It's doubly unjustified when the sender was sat in front of a keyboard large enough that they could use all ten of their digits to type with.

This is all about this mixing of the formal and informal registers. Previously, we only had this mixing in the spoken word. Now, you have formal and informal both coming through written mediums. What's so different about this is just as the informal register always has words in flux which will date speakers of a certain period "You're so rad" "That was a gasser!" "Really?" (as in "Is that actually how you are going to treat the situation?" ) these are short lived markers which are preserved in text (which one could argue my examples disprove, but imagine that people weren't just saying "Rad" in the 80's; there was a rich vocabulary of 80s words, which basically don't exist anymore.

Use your spell check in Word. ferget abaut it on tha fone, were doin it fer the lawlz

How dare you sir, I use "Rad," "Tubular," "Awesome," and other Super Mario World level names on a daily basis.

I for one am all for the txtifcation of speech. I think a lot of the rules of writing are archaic and unneeded in today's society, yet we rigidly enforce them because they are the 'rules'.

Seriously, what is the value of spelling out 'you' over just 'u'? So long as the reader understands what is being communicated, who cares how its spelled? Same thing with there vs they're. I roll my eyes anytime some pedant corrects one for the other. Its like really? You cant tell the difference from context?

The point of language is to communicate, it seems to me we should embrace norms that make that easier.

Language, written or spoken, is all about communicating ideas. If you are able to communicate your ideas to another person successfully, the particular form of language is irrelevant.

Txt-speak, as a relatively new language, is still evolving, and not completely universal. Thus, while it may be fine for communicating to one friend, another friend who doesn't read/speak the language (or may not appreciate it, etc) will find it difficult to understand you, and so you must adjust your format to a mutually agreeable language.

I, uh, take some...some issue with the, um, the, um, supposition that we, uh, should sound? no write the way, uh, the way we speak. well, i'd talk more speak, but, um, I'm not like and expert or anything.

Just because you are managing to communicate an idea doesn't mean that the form is irrelevant. Even if I can understand you, when structure and style get in the way of the message, efficacy is reduced.

Language, both written and spoken, is just using a lot of arbitrary conventions to get some meaning across to a listener or reader. As such, you will probably get the highest and fastest comprehension from the listener/reader if you stick to the "common" way of communicating as much as possible. I.e. write as they write in books, papers, subtitles, etc.

For me, txt-speak typically takes _at_least_ twice the time to read and comprehend. It's really a parsing activity, where I translate it to normal spelling/structure. I read books and newspapers and magazines and program code daily, and virtually nothing of that is written in txt-speak. Skimming text in normal English is easy, skimming even a few sentences in txtspeak is impossible.

The value of txt-speak is something else: It's fun and creative, and it's a way to mess around with the language. Sometimes it feels like a collection of quasi-memes, like "lol".

The community backlash is unsurprising, but I believe McWhorter has an interesting thought. If you can ignore or look past the eyeball-offending spellings, his point is that text/IM/chat patterns mimic the way we use the spoken word more closely than traditional writing.

That is noteworthy, anecdotes about your nephew's FB posts notwithstanding.

Is pretty obvious that technology is changing language, including things like texting and email. The article points out that you couldn't go back to 1993 and expect those people to understand us today. Look at how emotions have evolved,

The people pointing out the things like runon sentences or some of the worst of abbreviations are missing the point.

A language is separated by bad grammar by the fact tha languages are ordered rules (even if the order or rules aren't obvious compared to "mainstream" dialect). Just listen to people around you, and you now have people verbally saying "lol" out loud in spoken language. Same with "wtf". People a decade or so ago would be seriously confused if you were speaking this.

Yes, there are idiots who abbreviate pointless things or just lack any legibility, but this is different from the idea that texting has an implicit unique structure that is starting to see wide spread usage.